Jeff Nichols Quotes

Jeff Nichols

Profession : Director

Birth : December 7, 1978

A lot of people have a belief system that is strictly based on religious dogma.

Jeff Nichols

I have a very linear mind.

Jeff Nichols

Definitely when you give a script to an actor, it's like dropping a capsule in water and the fizzing starts. That's when the thing starts to live and breathe.

Jeff Nichols

I think we're so advanced when it comes to watching narrative material. I mean, it's all we do is consume content all day long. So when a character walks onscreen, you immediately start making connections for that character: Is that a good guy? Is that a bad guy?

Jeff Nichols

If you want someone to show up and execute your script for you, seriously, there are a lot of great people out there. Don't call me.

Jeff Nichols

I think the way you make a movie dictates the movie that you make.

Jeff Nichols

I think plot is very overrated. Plot is obviously necessary, but what I really care about is emotionally affecting the audience. Having a thought myself and then an emotional experience myself, somehow transferring that to the audience.

Jeff Nichols

My characters aren't chess pieces. I don't move them around some big board. I actually care about these fictitious people.

Jeff Nichols

'Mud' was a depository for a little more nostalgia and just a different kind of feeling, a different kind of mood. Something that's not so dark. Something that does actually have a happy ending and is a little more hopeful.

Jeff Nichols

I wrote 'Mud' for Matthew McConaughey and had never met him.

Jeff Nichols

Actors are real. It's a real skill, and it exists, and talent really exists.

Jeff Nichols

I've only seen one snake out in the wilderness, not behind glass, and I froze. I literally couldn't move. So to say I have a fear of snakes would be true.

Jeff Nichols

I am not going to approve the home-screening format for my film just carte blanche in lieu of a theatrical screening when I cannot trust that it will ever be seen in the format that it's intended to be.

Jeff Nichols

My stated goal as a filmmaker is to feel something. Is to have a palpable emotion in my life, carry it through the gauntlet of the filmmaking process and try and have it land for an audience at some point during the viewing experience. That to me is successful filmmaking.

Jeff Nichols

If I can drive down the road in my car and listen to XM satellite, and when a song gets beamed into my car, it can tell me who wrote the song and what the damn lyrics are, why, when you broadcast a digital signal of a film, can't it speak to your television to set up a list of settings to show the film in the way that it was meant to be shown?

Jeff Nichols

What Richard and Mildred Loving did was, by their nature, not by any calculus, they separated themselves from the political conversation. They did not have an agenda. They did not want to be martyrs. They did not want to be symbols of a movement.

Jeff Nichols

As a storyteller, you have to have something to say. You have to look at the world, think about it in relationship to yourself, and say, 'I think this is a pattern,' or 'I think this is the way fatherhood works,' or 'I think this is the way first love feels.' The danger in that is, that's when you open yourself up to real critique.

Jeff Nichols

I'm not as worried about the process of writing, simply because I think I've got that one down, you know? I think I know what brings specificity to these ideas, what brings specificity to the genre elements, or anything else, and it's personal emotions.

Jeff Nichols

My first job in the film business was working as a production assistant, and then a production manager on a documentary about Townes Van Zandt.

Jeff Nichols

Endings don't have anything to do with what your movie is about. Now, there is an emotional climax, there's an emotional resolution that is 100 percent important. If I get that wrong, get your money back.

Jeff Nichols